Anti-globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s was overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the Left. But now that the mantle of anti-globalization has been taken up by the Right, it will be interesting to see how many on the Left do an about-face, and also to see if the Right can succeed where the Left has consistently failed.Read more …

James Traub’s history of Times Square in New York, The Devil’s Playground (Random House, 2007) provides – perhaps unintentionally – an excellent case study illustrative of when and how American cities went wrong.

In March of 1960, the New York Times ran a long front-page story under the headline ‘Life on 42nd St. A Study in Decay.’ Read more …

What if Julius Evola had written a samurai treatise? What if Lao Tzu had written a long, systematic book of philosophy instead of the short, poetic chapters of the Tao Te Ching? What if the famed, long-lost book On Nature by Heraclitus — he who was called “The Dark” — were to be found and published? Read more …

When David Cameron coined the phrase “muscular liberalism” years ago, I like to imagine that he was thinking of Henry Rollins, who has long embodied a thoroughly peculiar combination of party-line leftism and masculine aggression. Rollins went from being the lead singer of Black Flag, to fronting his own Rollins Band in the ’90s, to being a successful indie author and owner of his own small publishing company, to being a film and television actor and now a regular columnist for L.A. Weekly. Read more …

Steve Sailer recently compared the Alt-Right to punk rock. It’s an apt analogy in more ways than one, and as someone whose adolescence was informed by that music, it’s one that I readily appreciated. I’ve long thought of writing an essay about the implicit whiteness of punk and hardcore music, especially since it’s a rather under-appreciated genre on the AltRight. Read more …

The Western Classical notion of identity comes to us from Herodotus’ Histories, written in the 5th century B.C. It’s from Herodotus that we have the story of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, told in the broader context of the entire Hellenic world’s successful resistance of the Persian invasion. In order to do that, the Spartans (Dorians) and Athenians (Ionians) had to overcome their differences and join together to defend what was common to both of them as Greeks. Read more …

Christ as warrior holding book that proclaims “I am the way, truth and life”

1,962 words

“Even apart from the value of such claims as ‘there is a categorical imperative in us,’ one can still always ask: what does such a claim tell us about the man who makes it?” — Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, Section 187)

I have been reflecting of late on the concept of truth, both as a philosophical concept and as a value. Growing up, I always took the notion of truth completely for granted. Read more …

Inspired by the unique revaluation of Alan Watts on Counter-Currents, I want to share my reflections on two decades of studying the “wisdom of the East” which Watts helped to popularize in his lifetime.